My friend sent this to me. She is a chief ER resident at Pittsburg. I thought I would share her wisdom...
[the biggest thing for med school is remember, even if you studied 24/7, you'd still never know it all.
do you know how the grading system works there? if they have an honors, pass, fail system, you'll want to try for honors in a handful of core subjects. again, if you try for honors in all you'll drive yourself (and others aroud you!) crazy. Important classes for honors (and for the core of medicine) are A&P, micro, immunology. biochem and epidemiology are good ones to understand well. make sure you get a good embryology book (moore's the developing human was the one i used) - really, everything is explained by embryology. it'll help you understand a lot of the physiology and anatomy later on. we had it integrated in our anatomy class. not sure how it is there. pathophysiology is another good class, but esoteric a lot of time. first year are the basic core sciences. usually you;ll get into systems the second year.
read every day. work out often. play weekly. make sure you take care of yourself and get some sleep. go to study groups and extra anatomy labs. befriend your classmates as you spend an extrodinarily large amout of time with them. take as many clinical opportunities as early as you can. we started interviewing patients about the 2nd week of classes. keep up to date on the rest of the world, remember, it keeps turning when you are in class. if you can, browse the new england journal and jama (or the lancet, annals of internal med, surgery or emergency medicine) to see what is new out there. plus, if you get in the habit now of at least reading the abstracts to a couple major journals a month, it will train you to continue in what ever field you are in. Medicine these days is very evidence based. you;ll hear that term a lot. unfortunately, you'll learn that a lot of what we do is not evidence based but so ingrained in the field that there is no way that a IRB (internal review board that approves research) would approve it. just keep that in mind when people say 'it's the standard of care'. it's interesting to see if there is evidence or just time to back that up.
you'll do great and love it. a suggestion to think of now that i wish i had continued is keep reading daily. i read a ton first and second year and most all of third year. it slowed down 4th year and i do very little reading now (actually i'm back to reading a lot more now that i am almost done and will be out on my own. i just wish i'd been reading this well throughout!) know that there are times when you just won' t have time to read (ie": surgery rotation), but you'll find at least a little time to catch a pearl here or there.
some great study books: (i'll just give you the first year list now, i'll send you more for 2nd and 3rd / 4th later)
Anatomy: Netter "atlas of human anatomy ' is by far the best atlas. pansky reivue of gross anatomy is a pretty good adjunct that has things written out as well as pictures. the anatomy coloring book is good too. especially for you as you are very visual and interactive.
Neuroanatomy: clinical neruoanatomy made ridiculously simple is great. it's little and easy to read . the "made ridic. simple" (mrs) series is for the most part, fantastic.
Micro/immuno: clinical microbiology MRS is fantastic. i still use references and nmemonics from there today. levinson/jawetz examination and board review: medical microbiolgy and immunology is a great book. more info but good
Pathology: the board review series (used to be red checked cover, 1st edition). schneider and szanto authors.
Physiology: board review series, (blue checked 1st edition) by costanzo also great. these books are set up in outline form and have a lot of good pointers and learning styles to do well on the boards . tehy have board questions and review exams as well.
the other series that you'll use in your clinical time is the recall series. surgical recall is a must and advanced surgical recall is good too. they have icu and medicine recall and a ton of others. if you do preceptorships in your first year or 2, get at least surgical if not medical recall to learn valuable clinical pearls.
this is the time to learn as much minutia as possible. remember to try to see the big picture as well. there will be much that you learn that they will say 'you'll probably never see this', but you will, eventually and if you acutally read about it now, it'll be stored in your brain to (hopefully) retreive at a later date. i remember when i was working at st. joe's and brad pulled some obscure diagnosis out his ass on this patient and he said - yeah, it was some little thing i remembered from med school. ]
